Jim Cogley Reflections – Tues 13 May – Mon 19 May 2025

Greetings to you all. Hoping you are experiencing these reflections as food for the soul. By passing them on to others they don’t stop with you but take on a life of their own. Together we are part of an outreach ministry and we never know how far it reaches. Blessings  Jim C

Coming Events:

The last of three Wood You Believe evening seminars entitled Getting the Past out of the Present involving Personal and Ancestral Healing is scheduled to be held in the Edmund Rice Healing Centre in Callan, Co Kilkenny on Thursday May 15^th from 7.00pm to 9.30pm. The cost is €20. Bookings by phone or text to Jim Maher on 086-1276649. This is a beautiful venue that is fast becoming established as a centre of Healing.

A seminar entitled Personal and Ancestral Healing will be held in Lady’s Island Community Centre on Saturday31^st May from 10am to 4pm. Cost €40 with refreshments included. Facilitators – Jim Cogley & Luba Rodzhuk. Bookings by phone or text to 087-7640407. Early booking is advisable.

Also, for those interested in doing some serious inner work over a number of days a retreat will be given by Jim Cogley and Luba Rodzhuk in An Tobar, Ardbraccan Retreat Centre in Navan. This will begin on the evening of Monday 30^th June and conclude on the following Friday. Please make bookings to An Tobar ASAP as numbers are limited, 046-9078973, Eircode C15 T884

Tues May 13^th – Living the Life of Grace

A wooden puzzle that comes apart with a gentle touch but resists when pressure is applied

I began the series of reflections this week with another title and that was ‘trying to live the life of grace.’ Then the realization dawned that what I had written was in direct contradiction to the nature of grace where the word ‘trying’ is the very factor that makes the life of grace impossible. Yet this idea that struggle and trying harder will get us where we need to be is very much embedded in our thinking. We tend to be like a fly that has flown into a spider’s web. Initially it’s just a single strand that sticks to him but in its panic to get free it becomes more and more enmeshed to the point of becoming dinner for the spider. The piece shown is a wooden puzzle comprising three pieces. To disengage the pieces no amount of pulling or trying will suffice. Yet by holding it in the hand and gently lifting one piece all three come apart. Such is the nature of grace.

Wed May 14^th – Grace at Work

By the age of 70 everyone is entitled to reflect back on their life journey and take the long view of what has been happening. For myself I am so grateful for knowing and seeing grace evident in every level of my life. By virtue of grace at work I have seen thousands of miracles, mind boggling co-incidences and amazing transformations. All of these have happened from a sense of co-operation with Spirit and certainly not from self-effort where I can claim any credit. I can now say with absolute honesty that whatever dreams or hopes I had for my life at 16 have been fulfilled a thousand times over. That does not mean that I have worked harder, prayed longer and earned a reward for years of diligence and commitment. Quite the opposite is the case. Somewhere in my distant past I learned a secret that worked – staying out of my own way and allowing God to be God.

Thurs May 15^th – The Leap of Faith

In yesterday’s posting I mentioned that the secret of grace is to get out of your own way and allow God to be God. Where and when I learned that I do not know. However, I do remember coming 16 and considering my future. I could see that everyone surrendered to something in life like money, material wealth, career, success, popularity, so why not surrender to God. Like all young people at that age, we want to give our lives to something greater than ourselves, and so with the impetuosity of youth I decided to go for broke. One day while in a barn beside a workbench I imagined it as a cliff upon which I was standing, and the challenge was to jump without knowing if I might be smashed on the rocks beneath if there was nothing to hold me up.

Fri May 16^th – The Everlasting Arms

Yesterday I wrote about making a leap of faith long before I had ever heard of the term. It was years later that such stories came my way and resonated deeply with what must have been some kind of instinctual knowing that letting go and letting God was not just a viable but the most exciting way to live one’s life. I still remember clearly the exhilaration of jumping off that metaphorical cliff into a totally unknown future where at 16 I was about to embark on my adult journey. I also remember the prayer offered as I saw myself flying through the air, that was something to this effect. ‘Lord, this is it, my life is yours, to do with me what you will, and if nothing worthwhile has happened when I reach the end, I will be holding you fully responsible’! It was a cheeky prayer from a cheeky 16-year-old, and it was then he had his first experience of grace where instead of being smashed against the rocks he found himself cradled in the everlasting arms. I couldn’t explain the experience, but in the weeks that followed my mother was convinced that I had fallen madly in love for the first time. It was true, she was almost right!

Sat May 17^th – ‘I’ It-is

Life tends to be like the game of golf, the lessons we are taught on the first day are the lessons we may still be learning on our last day, like head down and keep your eyes on the ball, swing slowly, etc. Keeping the ‘I ‘out of the picture seems to be essential for living the life of grace. It is this ‘I’ or ego that trips us up in a myriad of ways and we need to find ways to prevent this from happening. It may begin with ‘I’ need to try harder, or ‘I’ need to improve, and we don’t even notice the ‘I’ in our belief. Then it may take the form of ‘I’ need to discern what God is asking of me, or ‘I’ am someone who has difficulty hearing the voice of God. To leave out the ‘I’ is to say, ‘Lord I can’t see but you can reveal’, or ‘I can’t hear but you can speak’.  If we could succeed in any of these areas, we need to ask who would get the credit. The answer would be ‘I’, of course. So, a wonderful prayer for neutralizing the ego might be something like, ‘Lord, I can’t, but you can, and therefore I will.’

Sun May 18^th – Our Lady of the Knots

This being the month of May and the month of Our Lady, I would like to say a few words about a particular Marian devotion that is fast growing in popularity. It’s called Our Lady of the Knots and the picture that is associated with it is of Our Lady with two angels on either side. One is feeding her a very knotted rope while the other is taking it from her after she has untangled the knots.

The devotion has become quite associated with the late Pope Francis, but it didn’t begin with him. In fact, his introduction to the devotion marked a significant turning point in his life. Like so many he had reached a crossroads where he felt his life was a mess and he was a miserable failure.

The pope the world knew and loved so much was far from being the man he had been 40 years earlier. He was one of the first priests to be ordained after the Vatican Council and his leadership qualities and charisma were acknowledged when he was put in charge of the Jesuits in Argentina just a few years after ordination. There was a certain division in the Order between those who resisted change and wanted to go back to the way things were before the Council and those who wanted to embrace the reforms. At that stage, Fr Bergoglio as he was then, was a conservative, right-wing traditionalist who thought that the only way forward was to go backwards. He tried to suppress the changes that had been made just before his time and in so doing left a trail of destruction behind. He was autocratic, inconsiderate and listened to nobody. If you agreed with him, you could do okay but if you disagreed, he was quite ruthless. It was his way or the highway.

In his private life he was chauffeur driven and full of his own importance. He had no time for the poor and even tried to remove his priests from working in the poverty stricken pavellos.

Having been sent to sort things out Bergoglio had made things a thousand times worse so much so that it was to take three generations of Jesuit leaders to sort out the mess he had left behind. Rather than being elected for a second term of office he was sent to Germany to study for two years. While there a priest introduced him to this picture Our Lady of the Knots that was venerated in his church. The story was that centuries before a noble man whose marriage was falling apart interceded with Our Lady to save his marriage and to save the family from disgrace. The marriage was saved, and he had this painting commissioned in thanksgiving. Bergoglio’s response was, ‘That’s my life, its full of the knots of my own making that I am now unable to undo. My style of leadership has been dictatorial and divisive, and I have caused a lot of suffering. Perhaps by surrendering my life to Our Lady, the miracle of untying those knots might begin and I may even be given the chance to make amends for the wrongs I have done.

It didn’t happen immediately but happen it did. He returned to Buenos Aires and while he was no longer in charge, he hadn’t learned a lot and still tried to interfere and boss people around. His fellow Jesuits were having none of his nonsense and had him banished out of harm’s way to Cordova, a city 400 miles away. There he was still a young man in his 40s but effectively retired and just doing weekend duties. He said afterwards that Cordova was the place of humility and humiliation where God reduced him to his true greatness. He was now a broken man, a nobody who had lots of time to reflect on the mess of his life and the mistakes he had made. His pride had been his downfall.

It was after two years in exile that the then archbishop had a vacancy for an auxiliary and asked Bergoglio if he would take the post. He came back a very different man determined to listen to people and spend time with the poorest of the poor who lived on and from the city dumps. These were the ones who really changed Bergoglio into the man we knew. He became the champion of the poor and first Pope in history to have the courage to take the name Francis who was the saint of the poor in Italy.

While saying Mass in the slums he realized that 90% of his congregation were made up of those who years before he thought had little right to be there. In front of him he had prostitutes, drug users and pushers, thieves and rogues, people in all sorts of illicit marriages and unions. All of human life was there and they all came to communion. It was then that it finally dawned on him, what he later preached so often, that the church is a hospital for the sick and that communion is the medicine and since we are all sick and unworthy in one way or another who was he to deny anyone the Christ treatment that alone could restore health and wholeness.

By the time he was elected he was firmly established as the bishop of the slums who knew first-hand half of the poor in Buenos Aires. He had just handed in his compulsory resignation as Archbishop at 75 when the final unravelling of the knots that were in his life took place and he was made Pope. He attributed his pontificate to Our Lady of the Knots and I would love during my time here to design something for Our Lady’s Island that would be a fitting tribute to Our Lady as the Untier of all our Knots and indirectly to honour the memory of Francis as a wonderful Pope.

Mon May 19^th – Spotting the Ego

In my own spiritual journey learning ways to trick  the ego and so keep out of my own way has been crucial. In the very act of surrender we find we can give only so much, say ninety-five percent, but it is the five percent not given that undermines the rest. Here we can pray a deeper prayer, ‘Lord, I surrender even what I can’t or am unwilling to let go of’, and so we experience grace bringing us to where we need to go. Similarly, when we hand over a problem or situation to the Lord, how many have discovered the tendency to take it back and resume worrying? Again, to counteract the ego a simple trick is to pray, ‘Not just that I give you Lord this problem, but I also give you my innate tendency to take it back again’, and so we find ourselves held and sustained in the arms of grace.